


If Broken Hearts Were Whole

by firstbreaths



Category: House
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-12
Updated: 2013-11-12
Packaged: 2018-01-01 06:54:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1041711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstbreaths/pseuds/firstbreaths
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The liquor tastes heavy in her mouth and the TV flickers away in the  background – some medical drama and she knows now why she watches them,  because it’s not about the case it’s about the sex, and that’s how she’s  ended up, isn’t it?" Or: Cameron during 2x07.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If Broken Hearts Were Whole

It's only in the spaces between work and phone calls from her mother and silence that Cameron thinks about Chase, about choices and consequences and all those dirty words they use in high school drug reduction campaigns (obviously they didn't work too well on her).

She makes up excuses because she was school captain and top of her class at high school and the epitome of a good girl, and this is bad, bad, _bad,_ almost World War Three bad.

Her husband, he was softly spoken and dying, and it makes Cameron sad that they’re the adjectives she chooses from a pile of so many hidden at the back of her mind. It’s not so much about forgetting the way his hands were soft but his heart was warm or the way he smiled and the corners of his eyes crinkled like paper. It’s about the fact that these memories are dimmer now, buried beneath layers of flesh she uses like prison cell walls as she tries to allow Chase to unlock her heart.

House says that everybody lies, and in that, he’s the only one telling the truth.

Cameron lies about still loving him and then she lies about moving on, because the truth depends more upon the hour of the day and how many times Chase’s hand has brushed her as they bend over a patient more than what she really feels.

Nice girls don’t lie. She ignores the fact that they don’t fuck around with their colleagues one random Tuesday night when they’re high on drugs, either.

She always was good at that.

*

Her floor is littered with Chinese takeout and she barely leaves footprints on her own carpet as she dances around the mess. The liquor tastes heavy in her mouth and the TV flickers away in the background – some medical drama and she knows now why she watches them, because it’s not about the case it’s about the sex, and that’s how she’s ended up, isn’t it? Allison Cameron, MD, a carbon copy of the one person she never wanted to be: an actress.

Pretending breaks hearts. Cameron knows that all well.

Once, she used to pretend that her husband wasn’t dying, that he was going to be okay. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she hates herself for that, the weak little ditties she made up to sing herself to sleep because she couldn’t save him, couldn’t save them, couldn’t save herself. She would put on a brave face and waltz into work, textbook explanations and just another day saving another person who wasn’t the one she loved, _cared-for-would-die-for-not-just-wanting-to-heal_ loved, no matter what her colleagues said. In the spaces between one misty breath and the next, Cameron sometimes hated herself for wanting to say she believed them.

It was easier just to lie and pretend and lie some more, and Cameron didn’t so much fall off the rails as get shunted to the side, pushed from a life of prosperity into a life of misery through her own self destruction.

Her DVD cabinet is dusty, that fine dust you can’t see until it ruins your lungs and there’s a myriad of ants making their way up the wall, one-two, one-two, ordered in a way that she was once and never will be again.

But the vacuum cleaner is in the cupboard under the stairs and the calendar hangs beside it, forty-two more boxes to cross off in sharp red ink before D-Day. Cameron looks at it every morning at seven-oh-five, crosses yet another box, a monumental goodbye to another day she didn’t really live, and tries not to think about the implications of it all. If ignorance is bliss, then at least feigned unawareness means she’ll make one less fuck up at work, kill one less person, find one less reason to blame herself.

Her vacuum cleaner gathers as much dust as _Patch Adams_ and _Titanic_ and she never considers taking the calendar down. That would be sacrilege of the greatest kind, and even though she doesn’t believe in religion, she’s certainly starting to believe in hell.

*

“Why are you here?” Cameron knocks on Chase’s door. She’s not sure if she’s prouder for taking the first step or stealing his address from the employee files right under House’s nose. Love involves taking risks; risky behaviour, risky choices. That was just the first one Cameron made.

“It didn’t suck.”

“Cameron, you can’t just knock on a colleague’s door at ten o’clock and say something like that. I thought you, of all people, would have realised?”

“House teaches us to break into people’s homes without their permission, and you’re worrying that I’ve been corrupted because I’m knocking on your door and offering you a box of chocolates.” She shakes her head, lets her hair fan out, tries to be devastating and sexy and laughs as it all falls to pieces, her façade torn apart by his gaze.

She wasn’t made to be sexy. She was made to be pretty and smart and all those other adjectives, things that nice girls were – she isn’t a nice girl anymore but she isn’t a sexy girl either, and sometimes she wonders what Chase sees in her at all.

“Why are you here, Cameron?” Chase takes a step backwards, his body framed in the doorway. She can’t deny that _he’s_ sexy and she certainly wouldn’t say no to jumping _his_ bones, even if that’s what landed her in this fucked up situation last time. Deliberately, she ignores the fact that really it was Kalvin who screwed her over, Kalvin with his drugs and his ideas and his HIV, and when was the last time Cameron really lived? Cameron, who can’t even fuck things up properly.

“Why wouldn’t I be here? We slept together, and that’s usually grounds for me to come and visit.”

“Usually only applies in a typical scenario, Cameron. This isn’t typical.”

“This isn’t another case, either. Maybe it’s better when things are complicated.” Cameron draws in a breath; her lungs rattle and crash against her ribcage as she forces the air out, pushing sadness down and anger up. “Take your chocolates, I’m going.” She pauses. “I know you’re not always much for societal niceties, but you’re the one who took advantage of me, so I’m going to give you the opportunity to be the one to make it right.”

“If you think this is going to be like a romance movie, Cameron, and I’m going to ask you out and kiss you again on the doorstep, then you’re not the sort of girl I want to date at all. It doesn’t work like that.”

“No,” she whispers. How can she tell him that her chick-flick DVDs are covered in dust and her heart is shattered into so many pieces that she doesn’t expect him to make it whole, just better? “No, Chase, no.”

“Good.”

And then he kisses her until the porch light flickers on and the neighbours’ dog starts barking and she looks down at the pavement like a bad little girl, traipses to her car and drives silently home.

Chase doesn’t stop her as she opens her car door. She thinks of the way his lips felt against hers and can’t decide whether or not she wants him to.

*

It takes two mumbled hellos and approximately seven seconds for House to detect something else is up. Cameron waits for the probing questions and is actually more scared when he says nothing and sends her and Chase – Chase, should she be calling him Robert?, _Chase_ – off to do some test on a patient whose name she can barely remember.

They don surgical masks and scrub their hands, and as Chase undresses her with his gaze, she’s never felt dirtier.

“Can you pass me the vial please?” He leans over the table and accidentally brushes her hand and if Kalvin’s advice hasn’t ruined her last time, Cameron would have lived a little, nailing on a surgical desk with an unconscious patient slumbering way nearby.

Vaguely, she wonders when she got so crude. But the date can be pinpointed too close to the HIV, and right now she doesn’t want to think about that.

“Why should I? You can’t even ask me on a date, but you can ask me to do favours for you?”

Chase looks wary, apprehensive. Cameron hands him the scissors when she notices because that’s what she does, isn’t it? She cares.

“Should we be talking about this in front of a patient?”  
“He’s unconscious.”

“He’s also dying unless we figure this case out.”

“House will have an idea, he always does.”

Cameron waves it off with a flick of the wrist, lets out a laugh and really – have all those years of medical training added up to this? Sleeping with a co-worker and fucking up another case because she’s so apathetic she just can’t bring herself to care.

Once, she cared about dying people because her husband had been dying and she knew enough to sympathise. Once, she would have hurt from the core of her heart, which was both too full and too broken, and it made her feel comforted to know that she could still have some capacity to love.

Now she just feels hot and heavy under the lights and somewhere it dimly registers that she could be killing this man, killing-murdering-ruining this man, and she just feels rather indifferent about it all.

They conduct the rest of the test in silence, but sit together at lunch and somehow get trapped in the same elevator on their way to their cars and Chase spends a night (and then two and then three).

Cameron thinks that if she believed in fate, she’d think they were destined, star-crossed lovers or soul mates. But she became a scientist and a doctor because she didn’t believe in things that couldn’t be proved and all this coincidence is just that: coincidence. Maybe she feels apprehensive, reprehensive, completely ridiculously morally guilty, or maybe she just likes wallowing in her own despair and doesn’t want to believe that Chase, he can make it okay.

*

This is not a love story quite simply because she does not want it to be. Cameron twists and pulls away like a woman in the clutches of desire, and all she feels is emptiness and dirtiness and Chase’s fingers roaming their way down her sides towards her hips.

The days wash away like the Sahara sands in an hourglass, and she counts the boxes leading up to her HIV test, four, three, two, _one._ She dusts her DVDs and removes the cartons of fried rice from her fridge and maybe this is the love story she didn’t want. Maybe this is just the one she needed.

(Her test comes back negative. She always knew it would.)


End file.
